About the book
Dennis W. Bakke, co-founder and longtime chief executive of the energy company AES, makes the case that work should be fun. He tells how the company and its operating ethos took shape during a 90-minute drive from Annapolis to Washington, D.C., and grew into a worldwide energy business with 40,000 employees in 31 countries. Bakke treats workplace drudgery as a leftover of the Industrial Revolution. At AES, top executives erased divisions between labor and management, pushed decisions down to the plant floor, and regarded any decision made at the top as a missed chance to delegate. His argument puts employee satisfaction and autonomy ahead of profits as the route to business success.
Buffer co-founder Joel Gascoigne valued its definition of fun as trust and real decision-making rather than office perks, and its account of how hard running the company that way proved. WebdriverIO founder Kevin Lamping singled out Bakke's observation that work is where people in free societies are least free.
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This book has 2 recommendations
Joel Gascoigne (Co-founder/Buffer)
Joy At Work provides great insight into the journey of Dennis Bakke and AES, the company he co-founded. Bakke and his partner Roger Sant started the company and strived to live to a core value of Fun. It is a fascinating read in terms of their definition of fun (making important decisions and being given trust, not ping pong tables and snacks), and also in how difficult they found it to run the company unconventionally in order to be true to their values.
AES reached over 40,000 employees all across the world and they created a significantly different corporate structure than many organizations of today. At Buffer, AES and Bakke have been a big inspiration for us in staying true to our own values.
A large part of the process of staying true to the value of fun for Bakke was for him to be a sevant leader and to help individuals in the company make as many important decisions as possible. They devised the Decision Maker method of making decisions as a team, where the person closest to the problem (rather than a manger) makes key decisions. He also wrote a fable called The Decesion Maker around this concept, which I have also included in this list.
Kevin Lamping (Founder/WebdriverIO)
It's difficult to pick a single moment, as the best lessons are learned over time, hearing the same idea from different points of view. Taking time to digest the information to truly understand and begin to live it. There are some sentences you read that really hit home. Here's one of my favorites from the book *Joy at Work*: “In Western democracies, people are free almost everywhere except at work.” Doesn't that line just eat at your heart? How could a manager with even the slightest bit of soul not be heartbroken at that idea?
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